Climbing Mt. Everest

A couple of months ago, I completed a collage illustration as a commission for a Young Storytellers “story club” short story submission by an eleven year-old writer. Eduardo wrote of a young mountain climber looking to save his grandfather by retrieving a magical sword from the top of a mountain as high as Mt. Everest. I assembled my magazine cut-outs, conjured an image of Jack the climber and placed him on his quest in the clouds.

Today, I am listening to the NPR daily science podcast and they are interviewing James Kagambi, or “KG”, a 62 year old Kenyan man who has just recently climbed to the top of Mt. Everest, with knees his doctors told him urgently needed replacing. Returning to Nairobi as a hero, the first Kenyan to climb this beast of earth-rock, KG was also a part of the first all black climbing team (Full Circle Everest Expedition) to reach the “top of the world”. KG put strong determination over weak knees, self-awareness and focus over doubt, knowing that at 62 he is a wealth of wisdom and mountain-climbing experience. “I have something of value to offer this team”.

I think about firsts, being a first-born daughter in my own Kenyan family, my original climbing team. For the first time in my life, at 35, I am seeing that maybe I have value in communities outside of my home. I grieve some straying paths- my sister left home, got married and moved to a new city. My brother found his stride and a new job, also in a new city. My mother, the blood parent that lives closest to me, has been on her own journey for many years, taking us along when she could. My ex-partner, the person I tried to create new family with, still lives in the house we loved each other in- with someone new, after I chose a different path, with some circling regret.

Suddenly I find myself on my own journey. Climbing my own Everest, unsure about who I am climbing with or whether I much prefer the comfort of base camp. “One foot in front of the other L, baby steps”, I tell myself, taking KG’s advice to “use your own pace”. I start off a little like our other young hero climber, Jack, driving to the San Bernardino Mountains from Riverside to Crestline with a loose plan to save myself, instead of an ailing grandfather. I’ve decided to be an artist for real this time. I’ve signed on for an arts residency program and I write my way up, I dance my way up, I draw, I weave, I paint, I cry, I sing, I breathe. I am “a living, breathing poem”, climbing my way up to full, authentic expression.

Unlike KG, I haven’t always been so sure that my knees could carry me. I’ve struggled with self-doubt and not knowing how to be part of the team, especially not in this new, unfamiliar, sometimes scary place. I’m hung up on being Kenyan in America and I catch myself wondering “do I really have something of value to offer HERE?” As this residency progresses, I try to heal that nagging sense of otherness. I learn to climb through my trauma responses acquired from negotiating my worth in the world. I learn how much I can offer without feeling depleted, I learn what I can ask for without feeling like a burden. I resist the urge to appease or move at a pace that isn’t my own and sometimes I stop climbing just to enjoy where I am in the present.

My Everest is symbolic, some days it seems impossible- I have shifted through identities, expectations and mental blocks with patience, fortitude, frustration and when I can allow it, joy and gratitude! I get to create My Everest and then climb it! My only question is, what’s at the top and what happens when I get there? When you finally walk all the way through a jungle, there is village or town or field or ocean or desert. At the top of the world is… the heavens? and I have no reference for that besides my imagination and memories that I have repeatedly rejected of Sunday Mass. So I imagine- a heaven on earth, full of black climbers and artists, young latine writers and queer dreamers from marginalized communities. I imagine fewer firsts for those of us emerging into worlds that have previously felt so foreign, maybe even unwelcoming to us. Things are changing, we are finding our way, we are on our own quest in the clouds, co-creating with the heavens that we always knew in our bones, from knuckles to knees.